Craig Newmark posted an announcement last week on LinkedIn. "Okay, my deal is that I'm contributing another $10 million so that the City University of New York journalism grad school can go tuition-free for half the student body next year...

"Tuition-free means more seriously good journalism education for students from all income backgrounds..."

More details from the Observer: The New York City-based institution today announced plans to grow its endowment to $60 million by 2026 to cover the tuition of its full student body in perpetuity.

Founded in 2006, the Newmark Journalism School has long offered a public alternative to private, elite journalism programs across the nation, according to its dean Graciela Mochkofsky. "After the pandemic, we realized that even though we were one of the most affordable schools in the country, we were seeing an increasing need from our students," Mochkofsky told Observer. "We started thinking about how to get to tuition-free...."

"One-time grants to schools and newsrooms are an important piece of the puzzle," Newmark told Observer. "But if we're serious about the future of trustworthy journalism as democracy's immune system, we've got to create ways to make the pipeline and product more resilient to economics and shifting moods. Endowments help do that...."

The Newmark Journalism School has been gradually inching towards free tuition for some time. Tuition was covered for 20 percent of students in the class of 2023, 25 percent of the program's current class and 35 percent of the new class being enrolled. If the school's goal of raising $30 million in the next two years is achieved, this figure will reach 100 percent by its 20th anniversary in 2026...

It is additionally fundraising for other initiatives related to research, faculty, facilities and new programs. Curriculums that reflect the emergence of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and the technology's effect on journalism are of particular interest.

"What is lost when billionaires with no background nor interest in a civic mission, who are only concerned with profiteering, take over our most influential news organizations? What new models of news gathering, and dissemination show promise for our increasingly digital age? What can the public do to preserve and support vibrant journalism?"

That's a synopsis posted about the documentary Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink, cited by the long-standing news industry magazine Editor and Publisher (which dates back to 1901). This week its podcast interviewed filmmaker Rick Goldsmith about his 90-minute documentary, which they say "tells the tale" of how hedge fund Alden Global Capital clandestinely entered into the news publishing industry in a big way — and then "dismantled local newspapers 'piece by piece,' creating a crises within the communities they serve, leaving 'news deserts' and 'ghost papers' in their wake." [Goldsmith] spent more than 5-years creating his latest work... a film that tells the tale of how newspapers business model is faltering, not just because of the loss of advertising and digital disruption; but also to capitalist greed, as hedge funds and corporate America buy them, sell their assets and leave the communities they serve without their local "voice" and a final check on power.
On the podcast, Goldsmith notes that in many cases a paper's assets "were the newspaper buildings and the printing presses... These were worth in many cases more than the newspapers themselves." After laying off staff, the hedge fund could also downsize out of those buildings.

By 2021 Alden owned 100 newspapers and 200 more publications — and then acquired Tribune Publishing to become America's second-largest newspaper publisher.

The hedge fund currently owns several newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to SFGate: At first, Goldsmith's documentary might seem like it's delivering more bad news. But it avoids despair, offering hope on the horizon for news deserts where aggressive reporting is needed. It introduces the notion that the traditional capitalist business model is failing the news industry, and that nonprofit organizations must be providers of local coverage.

The chief content officer for New York's public radio station WNYC predicts an "AI-fueled shift to niche community and authored excellence."

And ironically, it will be fueled by "Greedy publishers and malicious propagandists... flooding the web with fake or just mediocre AI-generated 'content'" which will "spotlight and boost the value of authored creativity." And it may help give birth to a new generation of independent media. Robots will make the internet more human.

First, it will speed up our migration off of big social platforms to niche communities where we can be better versions of ourselves. We're already exhausted by feeds that amplify our anxiety and algorithms that incentivize cruelty. AI will take the arms race of digital publishing shaped by algorithmic curation to its natural conclusion: big feed-based social platforms will become unending streams of noise. When we've left those sites for good, we'll miss the (mostly inaccurate) sense that we were seeing or participating in a grand, democratic town hall. But as we find places to convene where good faith participation is expected, abuse and harassment aren't, and quality is valued over quantity, we'll be happy to have traded a perception of scale influence for the experience of real connection.

Second, this flood of authorless "content" will help truly authored creativity shine in contrast... "Could a robot have done this?" will be a question we ask to push ourselves to be funnier, weirder, more vulnerable, and more creative. And for the funniest, the weirdest, the most vulnerable, and most creative: the gap between what they do and everything else will be huge. Finally, these AI-accelerated shifts will combine with the current moment in media economics to fuel a new era of independent media.
For a few years he's seen the rise of independent community-funded journalists, and "the list of thriving small enterprises is getting longer." He sees more growth in community-funding platforms (with subscription/membership features like on Substack and Patreon) which "continue to tilt the risk/reward math for audience-facing talent....

"And the amount of audience-facing, world-class talent that left institutional media in 2023 (by choice or otherwise) is unlike anything I've seen in more than 15 years in journalism... [I]f we're lucky, we'll see the creation of a new generation of independent media businesses whose work is as funny, weird, vulnerable and creative as its creators want it to be. And those businesses will be built on truly stable ground: a direct financial relationship with people who care.

"Thank the robots."

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. From a report: The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit [PDF], filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" related to the "unlawful copying and use of The Times's uniquely valuable works." It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times. The lawsuit could test the emerging legal contours of generative A.I. technologies -- so called for the text, images and other content they can create after learning from large data sets -- and could carry major implications for the news industry. The Times is among a small number of outlets that have built successful business models from online journalism, but dozens of newspapers and magazines have been hobbled by readers' migration to the internet.

After billionaire Bill Ackman demanded three college presidents "resign in disgrace," that post on X — excerpting their testimony before a U.S. Congressional committee — has now been viewed more than 104 million times, provoking a variety of reactions.

Saturday afternoon, one of the three college presidents resigned — University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill.

Politico reports that the Republican-led Committee now "will be investigating Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania after their institutions' leaders failed to sufficiently condemn student protests calling for 'Jewish genocide.'" The BBC reports a wealthy UPenn donor reportedly withdrew a stock grant worth $100 million.

But after watching the entire Congressional hearing, New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that she'd seen a "more understandable" context: In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap [Congresswoman Elise] Stefanik laid. "You understand that the use of the term 'intifada' in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?" she asked Claudine Gay of Harvard. Gay responded that such language was "abhorrent."

Stefanik then badgered her to admit that students chanting about intifada were calling for genocide, and asked angrily whether that was against Harvard's code of conduct. "Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, 'From the river to the sea' or 'intifada,' advocating for the murder of Jews?" Gay repeated that such "hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me," but said action would be taken only "when speech crosses into conduct." So later in the hearing, when Stefanik again started questioning Gay, Kornbluth and Magill about whether it was permissible for students to call for the genocide of the Jews, she was referring, it seemed clear, to common pro-Palestinian rhetoric and trying to get the university presidents to commit to disciplining those who use it. Doing so would be an egregious violation of free speech. After all, even if you're disgusted by slogans like "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," their meaning is contested...
Liberal blogger Josh Marshall argues that "While groups like Hamas certainly use the word [intifada] with a strong eliminationist meaning it is simply not the case that the term consistently or usually or mostly refers to genocide. It's just not. Stefanik's basic equation was and is simply false and the university presidents were maladroit enough to fall into her trap."

The Wall Street Journal published an investigation the day after the hearing. A political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley hired a survey firm to poll 250 students across the U.S. from "a variety of backgrounds" — and the results were surprising: A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported "definitely" supporting "from the river to the sea" because "Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side." Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to "probably not." Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view... In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting "from the river to the sea" to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region's geography, history, or demography.
More about the phrase from the Associated Press: Many Palestinian activists say it's a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians. Jews hear a clear demand for Israel's destruction... By 2012, it was clear that Hamas had claimed the slogan in its drive to claim land spanning Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank... The phrase also has roots in the Hamas charter... [Since 1997 the U.S. government has considered Hamas a terrorist organization.]

"A Palestine between the river to the sea leaves not a single inch for Israel," read an open letter signed by 30 Jewish news outlets around the world and released on Wednesday... Last month, Vienna police banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration, citing the fact that the phrase "from the river to the sea" was mentioned in invitations and characterizing it as a call to violence. And in Britain, the Labour party issued a temporary punishment to a member of Parliament, Andy McDonald, for using the phrase during a rally at which he called for a stop to bombardment.
As the controversy rages on, Ackman's X timeline now includes an official response reposted from a college that wasn't called to testify — Stanford University: In the context of the national discourse, Stanford unequivocally condemns calls for the genocide of Jews or any peoples. That statement would clearly violate Stanford's Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.
Ackman also retweeted this response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i'd like to just state that i was totally wrong. i still don't understand it, really. or know what to do about it. but it is so fucked.
Wednesday UPenn's president announced they'd immediately consider a new change in policy," in an X post viewed 38.7 million times: For decades under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn's policies have been guided by the [U.S.] Constitution and the law. In today's world, where we are seeing signs of hate proliferating across our campus and our world in a way not seen in years, these policies need to be clarified and evaluated. Penn must initiate a serious and careful look at our policies, and provost Jackson and I will immediately convene a process to do so. As president, I'm committed to a safe, secure, and supportive environment so all members of our community can thrive. We can and we will get this right. Thank you.
The next day the university's business school called on Magill to resign. And Saturday afternoon, Magill resigned.

CNN decries "false and bizarre" news stories being published by Microsoft on MSN.com, "one of the world's most trafficked websites and a place where millions of Americans get their news every day." Microsoft's decision to increasingly rely on the use of automation and artificial intelligence over human editors to curate its homepage appears to be behind the site's recent amplification of false and bizarre stories, people familiar with how the site works told CNN.

The site, which comes pre-loaded as the default start page on devices running Microsoft software, including on Microsoft's latest "Edge" browser... employed more than 800 editors in 2018 to help select and curate news stories shown to millions of readers around the world. But in recent years Microsoft has laid off editors, some of whom were told they were being replaced by "automation," what they understand to be AI.
CNN points out that while Microsoft's president "has publicly lectured on the responsible use" of AI, "the apparent role of AI in Microsoft's recent amplification of bogus stories raises questions about the company's public adoption of the nascent technology and for the journalism industry as a whole." CNN notes that an AI-generated poll urging readers to guess the cause of a swimmer's death "was not the first public blunder caused by Microsoft's embrace of AI." In September Microsoft republished a story about Brandon Hunter, a former NBA player who died unexpectedly at the age of 42, under the headline, "Brandon Hunter useless at 42." Then, in October, Microsoft republished an article that claimed that San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston had resigned from his position after criticism from Elon Musk. The story was entirely false.

Some of the articles featured by Microsoft were initially published by obscure websites that might have gone unnoticed amid the daily deluge of online misinformation that circulates every day. But Microsoft's decision to republish articles from fringe outlets has elevated those stories to potentially millions of additional readers, breathing life into their claims. Editors who formerly worked for Microsoft told CNN that these kinds of false stories, or virtually any other articles from low-quality websites, would not be prominently featured by Microsoft were it not for its use of AI. Ryn Pfeuffer, who worked intermittently as a contractor for Microsoft for eight years, said she received a call in May 2020 with the news that her entire team was being laid off. 2020 was the year, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNN in a statement on Wednesday, that the company began transitioning to a "personalized feed" that is "tailored by an algorithm to the interests of our audiences."
MSN "has also published other junk content, including bogus stories about fishermen catching mermaids and Bigfoot spottings," reports the tech news site Futurism, "in the wake of ditching its human editors in favor of automation.

"Noticing a pattern yet? The company pumps out trash-tier AI content, then waits until it's called out publicly to quietly delete it and move onto the next trainwreck." We've known that Microsoft's MSN news portal has been pumping out a garbled, AI-generated firehose for well over a year now. The company has been using the website to distribute misleading and oftentimes incomprehensible garbage to hundreds of millions of readers per month... And if MSN presents a vision of how the tech industry's obsession with AI is going to play out in the information ecosystem, we're in for a rough ride.
CNN got this reaction from a user whose default browser changed from Chrome to Microsoft Edge after a software update — and discovered their home page had switched to MSN.com. "It felt like I was standing in line at the grocery store reading a National Enquirer front page."

A company spokesperson assured CNN that Microsoft was "committed to addressing the recent issue of low quality articles."

The Washington Post looks at the "millions of independent creators reshaping how people get their news, especially the youngest viewers." News consumption hit a tipping point around the globe during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, with more people turning to social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram than to websites maintained by traditional news outlets, according to the latest Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. One in 5 adults under 24 use TikTok as a source for news, the report said, up five percentage points from last year. According to Britain's Office of Communications, young adults in the United Kingdom now spend more time watching TikTok than broadcast television. This shift has been driven in part by a desire for "more accessible, informal, and entertaining news formats, often delivered by influencers rather than journalists," the Reuters Institute report says, adding that consumers are looking for news that "feels more relevant...."

While a few national publications such as the New York Times and The Washington Post have seen their digital audiences grow, allowing them to reach hundreds of thousands more readers than they did a decade ago, the economics of journalism have shifted. Well-known news outlets have seen a decline in the amount of traffic flowing to them from social media sites, and some of the money that advertisers previously might have spent with them is now flowing to creators. Even some outlets that began life on the internet have struggled, with BuzzFeed News shuttering in April, Vice entering into bankruptcy and Gawker shutting down for a second time in February. The trend is likely to continue. "There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older," Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said in the report, which is based on an online survey of roughly 94,000 adults in 46 national markets, including the United States...

While many online news creators are, like Al-Khatahtbeh, trained journalists collecting new information, others are aggregators and partisan commentators sometimes masquerading as journalists. The transformation has made the public sphere much more "chaotic and contradictory," said Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the PressThink blog, adding that it has never been easier to be both informed and misinformed about world events. "The internet makes possible much more content, and reaching all kinds of people," Rosen said. "But it also makes disinformation spread."
The article notes that "some content creators don't follow the same ethical guidelines that are guideposts in more traditional newsrooms, especially creators who seek to build audiences based on outrage."

The article also points out that "The ramifications for society are still coming into focus."

The creator economy is probably bigger than you think. The Washington Post reports it's "now a global industry valued at $250 billion, with tens of millions of workers, hundreds of millions of customers and its own trade association and work-credentialing programs." Millions have ditched traditional career paths to work as online creators and content-makers, using their computers and phones to amass followers and build businesses whose influence now rivals the biggest names in entertainment, news and politics... In the United States, the video giant YouTube estimated that roughly 390,000 full-time jobs last year were supported by its creators' work — four times the number of people employed by General Motors, America's biggest automaker...

This spring, analysts at Goldman Sachs said that 50 million people now work as creators around the world. The analysts expect the industry's "total addressable market," an estimate of consumer demand, will jump from $250 billion this year to $480 billion by 2027. For comparison, the global revenue from video games, now at about $227 billion, is expected to climb to roughly $312 billion by 2027, analysts at the financial giant PwC estimated in June. YouTube's report estimated that its creators contributed $35 billion to [U.S.] gross domestic product last year, a figure that would rank the group's combined output ahead of U.S. furniture manufacturing but behind rail transportation, according to industry data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis....

Payments from advertisers to creators in the United States have more than doubled since 2019, to $5 billion, estimates from the market research firm Insider Intelligence show... Megan Pollock, a branding executive at Panasonic North America, said that the company now devotes about 10 percent of its marketing budget to creators and that she expects further increases amid a long-term shift away from traditional ad campaigns.
Other interesting details from the article:

• Last month people watched 53 million hours of video a day just on Twitch. But 74% of that went to the top 10,000 streamers (according to data from the analytics firm StreamElements).

• "Creators' incomes are determined by giant tech and advertising companies that can change the rules in an instant, and a single mistake can unravel their careers."

• When America's youth are asked what they want to be when they grow up, "Influencer" is now one of the most popular answers — ranking higher than "astronaut" and "professional athlete"

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: For years, tech companies like Open AI have freely used news stories to build data sets that teach their machines how to recognize and respond fluently to human queries about the world. But as the quest to develop cutting-edge AI models has grown increasingly frenzied, newspaper publishers and other data owners are demanding a share of the potentially massive market for generative AI, which is projected to reach to $1.3 trillion by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Since August, at least 535 news organizations — including the New York Times, Reuters and The Washington Post — have installed a blocker that prevents their content from being collected and used to train ChatGPT. Now, discussions are focused on paying publishers so the chatbot can surface links to individual news stories in its responses, a development that would benefit the newspapers in two ways: by providing direct payment and by potentially increasing traffic to their websites. In July, Open AI cut a deal to license content from the Associated Press as training data for its AI models. The current talks also have addressed that idea, according to two people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, but have concentrated more on showing stories in ChatGPT responses.

Other sources of useful data are also looking for leverage. Reddit, the popular social message board, has met with top generative AI companies about being paid for its data, according to a person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. If a deal can't be reached, Reddit is considering blocking search crawlers from Google and Bing, which would prevent the forum from being discovered in searches and reduce the number of visitors to the site. But the company believes the trade-off would be worth it, the person said, adding: "Reddit can survive without search."
"The moves mark a growing sense of urgency and uncertainty about who profits from online information," the article argues. "With generative AI poised to transform how users interact with the internet, many publishers and other companies see fair payment for their data as an existential issue."

They also cite James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, who suggests Open AI's decision to negotiate "may reflect a desire to strike deals before courts have a chance weigh in on whether tech companies have a clear legal obligation to license — and pay for — content."

"The major online platforms are breaking up with news," reports the New York Times: Campbell Brown, Facebook's top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram's Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off... Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates...

Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark. Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry's business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5% of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5%...

The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has hit all news publishers, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by the Times. "We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution," Emma Tucker, the Journal's editor-in-chief, told the newsroom in the meeting...

Google cut some members of its news partnership team in September, and this week it laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news website, reported the Google News layoffs earlier.) "We've made some internal changes to streamline our organization," Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement... Jaffer Zaidi [Google's vice president of global news partnerships], wrote in an internal memo reviewed by the Times that the team would be adopting more artificial intelligence. "We had to make some difficult decisions to better position our team for what lies ahead," he wrote...

Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to better prepare if Google's AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.

Vice Media Group is planning to sell to investors for about $400 million -- a fraction of its once high-flying $5.7 billion valuation back in 2017. The investors include Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management, according to the Wall Street Journal. Variety reports: Cash-strapped Vice Media has been searching for a buyer over the past year, to no avail. In February, Nancy Dubuc announced her exit as CEO after almost five years. The company subsequently appointed longtime execs Bruce Dixon and Hozefa Lokhandwala as co-CEOs. Under the proposed sale to "senior lenders," Fortress "plans to find a role for Vice co-founder Shane Smith," who is executive chairman and previously served as CEO prior to Dubuc's hire.

The bankruptcy and sale would "wipe out" most of Vice's other shareholders, including TPG Group and James Murdoch (who invested in the company via his Lupa Systems investment firm), per the Journal report. Vice has been unable to pay many of its vendors and recently secured a $30 million "lifeline" from Fortress, the Journal previously reported. Last week, the New York Times reported that Vice Media was preparing for bankruptcy after being unable to find a buyer. It announced a series of layoffs and said it was pulling the plug on "Vice News Tonight."

"Vice Media Group appears to be the latest digital media company in trouble," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "The New York Times reports that the company is preparing for bankruptcy after being unable to find a buyer. Vice canceled Vice News Tonight only four days ago. The company, once valued at over $5.7 billion, has been bleeding cash, and major investors such as Disney will take a huge loss." From the report: In the event of a bankruptcy, Vice's largest debt holder, Fortress Investment Group, could end up controlling the company, said one of the people. Vice would continue operating normally and run an auction to sell the company over a 45-day period, with Fortress in pole position as the most likely acquirer. Unlike Vice's other investors, which have included Disney and Fox, Fortress holds senior debt, which means it gets paid out first in the event of a sale. Disney, which has already written down its investments, is not getting a return, the person said.

Vice began as a punk magazine in Montreal more than two decades ago. Over the years, it blossomed into a global media company with a movie studio, an ad agency, a glossy show on HBO and bureaus in far-flung world capitals. Disney, after investing hundreds of millions in Vice, explored buying the company in 2015 for more than $3 billion, according to the two people familiar with the conversations. "Vice Media Group has been engaged in a comprehensive evaluation of strategic alternatives and planning," Vice said in a statement on Monday. "The company, its board and stakeholders continue to be focused on finding the best path for the company."

The Boston Globe reports that U.S. Senator Ed. Markey just sent a letter to more than 20 car manufacturers asking them to continue including AM radios in future car models — including electric vehicles: Some EV manufacturers have raised concerns even as far back as 2016 about how the battery power of an EV can interfere with AM radio signals. However, Markey addressed these concerns saying, "car manufacturers appear to have developed innovative solutions to this problem."
"The last time I listened to AM radio was in the late 1970s," writes long-time Slashdot reader non-e-moose. "And then it was mostly because there were either no FM stations in reception range, or I was riding my bicycle and only had a transistor radio."

But the Senator sees it differently: AM radio has long been an important source of information for consumers. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 90 percent of Americans ages 12 and older — totaling hundreds of millions of people — listened to AM or FM radio each week, higher than the percentage that watch television (56 percent) or own a computer (77 percent).... Moreover, 33 percent of new car buyers say that AM radio is a very important feature in a vehicle — higher than dedicated Wi-Fi (31 percent), SiriusXM satellite radio (27 percent), and personal assistants such as Google Assistant (12 percent) and Amazon Alexa (9 percent). In other words, broadcast AM and FM radio remain an essential vehicle feature for consumers.

Moreover, broadcast AM radio, in particular, is a critical mechanism for government authorities to communicate with the public during natural disasters, extreme weather events, and other emergencies. AM radio operates at lower frequencies and has longer wavelengths than FM radio, so AM radio waves more easily pass through solid objects. As a result, AM radio signals can travel long distances, making them well-suited for broadcasting emergency alerts....

Despite innovations such as the smartphone and social media, AM/FM broadcast radio remains the most dependable, cost-free, and accessible communication mechanism for public officials to communicate with the public during times of emergency. As a result, any phase-out of broadcast AM radio could pose a significant communication problem during emergencies.... Given AM radio's importance for emergency communications and continued consumer demand, I urge your company to maintain the feature in its new vehicles...

"Twitter CEO Elon Musk turned to journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday to reveal the decision-making behind the platform's suppression of a 2020 article from the New York Post regarding Hunter Biden's laptop," reports Newsweek.

"Taibbi later deleted a tweet showing [former Twitter CEO] Jack Dorsey's email address," adds the Verge, covering reactions to Taibbi's thread — and the controversial events that the tweets described: At the time, it was not clear if the materials were genuine, and Twitter decided to ban links to or images of the Post's story, citing its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. The move was controversial even then, primarily among Republicans but also with speech advocates worried about Twitter's decision to block a news outlet. While Musk might be hoping we see documents showing Twitter's (largely former) staffers nefariously deciding to act in a way that helped now-President Joe Biden, the communications mostly show a team debating how to finalize and communicate a difficult moderation decision.
Taibbi himself tweeted that "Although several sources recalled hearing about a 'general' warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there's no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story."

More from the Verge: Meanwhile, Taibbi's handling of the emails — which seem to have been handed to him at Musk's direction, though he only refers to "sources at Twitter" — appears to have exposed personal email addresses for two high-profile leaders: Dorsey and Representative Ro Khanna. An email address that belongs to someone Taibbi identifies as Dorsey is included in one message, in which Dorsey forwards an article Taibbi wrote criticizing Twitter's handling of the Post story. Meanwhile, Khanna confirmed to The Verge that his personal Gmail address is included in another email, in which Khanna reaches out to criticize Twitter's decision to restrict the Post's story as well.

"As the congressman who represents Silicon Valley, I felt Twitter's actions were a violation of First Amendment principles so I raised those concerns," Khanna said in a statement to The Verge. "Our democracy can only thrive if we are open to a marketplace of ideas and engaging with people with whom we disagree."

The story also revealed the names of multiple Twitter employees who were in communications about the moderation decision. While it's not out of line for journalists to report on the involvement of public-facing individuals or major decision makers, that doesn't describe all of the people named in the leaked communications.... "I don't get why naming names is necessary. Seems dangerous," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote Friday in apparent reference to the leaks.... The Verge reached out to Taibbi for comment but didn't immediately hear back.

Twitter, which had its communications team dismantled during layoffs last month, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Wired adds: What did the world learn about Twitter's handling of the incident from the so-called Twitter Files? Not much. After all, Twitter reversed its decision two days later, and then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the moderation decision was "wrong."
In other news, "Twitter will start showing view count for all tweets," Elon Musk announced Friday, "just as view count is shown for all videos." And he shared other insights into his plans for Twitter's future.

"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of reach. Negativity should & will get less reach than positivity."

The US government must drop its prosecution of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange because it is undermining press freedom, according to the media organizations that first helped him publish leaked diplomatic cables. The Guardian reports: Twelve years ago today, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais collaborated to release excerpts from 250,000 documents obtained by Assange in the "Cablegate" leak. The material, leaked to WikiLeaks by the then American soldier Chelsea Manning, exposed the inner workings of US diplomacy around the world. The editors and publishers of the media organizations that first published those revelations have come together to publicly oppose plans to charge Assange under a law designed to prosecute first world war spies. "Publishing is not a crime," they said, saying the prosecution is a direct attack on media freedom.

Having trouble falling asleep, a writer for Vulture pondered a study from February in the Journal of Sleep Research that "runs refreshingly counter to common sleep-and-screens wisdom." For years, science and conventional wisdom have stated unequivocally that looking at a device — like a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or television — before bed is akin to lighting years of your natural life on fire, then letting the flames consume your children, your community, and the very concept of human progress....

Specifically interested in the use of "entertainment media" (streaming services, video games, podcasts) before bed, [the new February study's] researchers asked a group of 58 adults to keep a sleep diary and found that, if participants consumed entertainment media in the hour before bed, the habit was associated with an earlier bedtime as well as more sleep overall (though the benefits diminished if participants binged for longer than an hour or multitasked on their phones). Essentially, these researchers explored screen use before bed as a form of relaxation rather than a form of self-harm, which is exactly how I and probably 5 billion other people use it — as a way of distracting our minds from the onslaught of material reality just before we drift off to temporary oblivion.
Vulture's writer interviews Dr. Morgan Ellithorpe, one of the authors of the Journal of Sleep Research study and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware who specializes in media psychology. Dr. Ellithorpe is a proponent of intentional media use as a way to relieve stress, but she tells me that, in her research, she's found that the worst types of media to absorb before bed are those that have no "stopping point" — Instagram, TikTok, shows designed to be binge-watched. If you intend to binge a show, that might be fine: "Making a plan and sticking to it seems to matter," she says. We agree that humans are famously bad at that, and that's where the problems begin. The solution, Dr. Ellithorpe says, is figuring out why we're on our screens and if that reason is "meaningful." Are we turning to a screen in order to recover from an eventful day? Because we want something to talk about with our friends? Because we're seeking, as she puts it, a moment of "hedonic enjoyment"? The key is that you must be able to recognize when that need is fulfilled. Then "you're likely to have a good experience, and you won't need to force yourself to stop. But it takes practice."

Dr. Ellithorpe cites several studies for me to review — on gratification, mood-management theory, selective exposure, and self-determination theory — all of which, to various extents, grapple with the notion that human beings can make decisions to use media for purposeful things. "There's this push now to realize that people aren't a monolith, and media uses that seem bad for some people can actually be really good for other people." Although many researchers like Dr. Ellithorpe and her cohort are onboard with this push, she admits that "the movement has not filtered out to the public yet. So the public is still on this kick of 'Oh, media's bad.'"

And that's a huge part of the issue. "We sabotage ourselves when it comes to benefiting from media because we've been taught in our society to feel guilty for spending leisure time with media," Dr. Ellithorpe says. "The research in this area suggests that people who want to use media to recover from stress, if they then feel bad about doing so, they don't actually get the benefit from the media use."

But even Dr. Ellithorpe is prone to unintentional sleep moralizing, saying she is often "bad" and "on her phone two seconds before I turn off the light." She recommends watching a "low-challenge show" before bed and, like Dr. Kennedy, cites Stranger Things specifically as a dangerous pre-bed content choice because "you have to keep track of all the characters, remember what happened three seasons ago, and it's emotionally charged. It might be difficult afterward to come down from that and go to bed." In the end, she suggests watching whatever you want as long as it doesn't delay your bedtime.

The BBC is celebrating the centenary of its first official broadcast - a news bulletin that included a court report from the Old Bailey, details of London fog disruption, and billiards scores. From a report: It was broadcast by London station 2LO, but new research shows many early BBC moments came from northern England. Manchester station 2ZY aired the first children's show and introduced the first regular weather forecast. Birmingham's 5IT station broadcast the first "official concert" The BBC that began broadcasting at 6pm on 14 November 1922 was not the British Broadcasting Corporation of today. It was in fact the British Broadcasting Company and was made up of separate stations around the country operated by different companies. London 2LO was run by the Marconi company. Manchester's station was operated by Metropolitan-Vickers. However, in these early days few records were kept of what was broadcast.

But new research on the BBC's very early days has been carried out by Steve Arnold, a self-confessed Radio Times obsessive. His tricky task was to try to piece together the BBC's schedules before the Radio Times - so named as it listed the times that the new medium's shows were being broadcast - was first published in September 1923. He explained he found information in "gossip columns [in regional newspapers] mainly, people saying we listened to this last night and this is the only record of some of these things". Now, using sources from archive documents and newspapers, Steve has begun to piece together a picture of what the early BBC was doing. He says the Manchester station, which operated out of Trafford Park, seems to have been the best organised. "It looks as though the Manchester station is probably the origins of the BBC as much as the Marconi 2LO station (in London)," he said. "They seem to have had a far more professional approach. There's a lot more documentation and it seems they knew their onions. I'd love to know more."

"Ten years on from discovery, there's still a lot left to learn about the Higgs boson!" tweeted a researcher anticipating their experiment on the Large Hadron Collider.

But on Facebook, there's posts calling CERN "a demonic/Evil machine that opens up portals to other dimensions/Hell/other spiritual worlds" and "brings in demons wicked spirits/High Evil Principalities." And USA Today reports that similar posts making that same claim "have amassed hundreds of interactions on Facebook and Twitter." (Their article then goes on to assure readers that "the claim is baseless.")

In fact, USA Today's "Fact Check" feature spent some time investigating the claims of a demonic machine opening portals to hell, and after exhaustive research can report that at this time "There is no evidence scientists at CERN are engaged in anything other than scientific-related activities." Physics experts told USA TODAY scientists use the Large Hadron Collider to collide particles at very high energies to study matter. There is no truth to the claim that scientists at CERN are communicating with demonic entities and using the collider to open up a portal to hell, Dejan Stojkovic, a physics professor at the University at Buffalo, told USA TODAY in an email.
The physics behind his explanation is interesting: "To create a black hole or a wormhole, even microscopic ones, with our current technology, in the context of our standard theories of gravity, we need an accelerator as big as the whole universe," Stojkovic said. "So there is no chance whatsoever to create such a portal at the [Large Hadron Collider]."

"Since these are previously unexplored energies in a controlled environment, we might expect production of some new elementary particles that we did not know if they existed," Stojkovic said. "However, these are microscopic particles, so there is no chance such a portal would open."
Facebook has now attached a warning to its user's post about a demonic machine opening up portals to hell, notifying users that the post contains "False information." (It adds that this assertion has been "checked by independent fact-checkers," linking back to USA Today's article for support.)

USA Today ends its analysis with a definitive summation: Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that scientists at CERN are communicating with demonic entities and opening a portal to hell. There is no evidence scientists at CERN are engaged in anything other than scientific-related activities. The collider cannot open up portals to other dimensions. Experts said scientists use the machine to collide particles at very high energies to study matter....

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Iamthecheese for sharing the story!

The New York Times' product-recommendation service "Wirecutter" has sparked widening criticism about how laptops are reviewed. The technology/Apple blog Daring Fireball first complained that they "institutionally fetishize price over quality". That makes it all the more baffling that their recommended "Best Laptop" — not best Windows laptop, but best laptop, full stop — is a Dell XPS 13 that costs $1,340 but is slower and gets worse battery life (and has a lower-resolution display) than their "best Mac laptop", the $1,000 M1 MacBook Air.
Technically Dell's product won in a category titled "For most people: The best ultrabook" (and Wikipedia points out that ultrabook is, after all, "a marketing term, originated and trademarked by Intel.") But this leads blogger Jack Wellborn to an even larger question: why exactly do reviewers refuse to do a comparison between Wintel laptops and Apple's MacBooks? Is it that reviewers don't think they could fairly compare x86 and ARM laptops? It seems easy enough to me. Are they afraid that constantly showing MacBooks outperforming Wintel laptops will give the impression that they are in the bag for Apple? I don't see why. Facts are facts, and a lot of people need or want to buy a Windows laptop regardless. I can't help but wonder if, in the minds of many reviewers, MacBooks were PCs so long as they used Intel, and therefore they stopped being PCs once Apple switched to using their own silicon.
Saturday Daring Fireball responded with their own assessment. "Reviewers at ostensibly neutral publications are afraid that reiterating the plain truth about x86 vs. Apple silicon — that Apple silicon wins handily in both performance and efficiency — is not going to be popular with a large segment of their audience. Apple silicon is a profoundly inconvenient truth for many computer enthusiasts who do not like Macs, so they've gone into denial..."

Both bloggers cite as an example this review of Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2, which does begin by criticizing the device's old processor, its un-backlit keyboard, its small selection of ports, and its low-resolution touchscreen. But it ultimately concludes "Microsoft gets most of the important things right here, and there's no laptop in this price range that doesn't come with some kind of trade-off...." A crime of omission — or is the key phrase "in this price range"? (Which gets back to Daring Fireball's original complaint about "fetishizing price over quality.") Are Apple's new Silicon-powered laptops sometimes being left out of comparisons because they're more expensive?

In an update, Wellborn acknowledges that this alleged refusal-to-compare apparently actually precedes Apple's launch of its M1 chip. But he argues that now it's more important than ever to begin making those comparisons: It's a choice between a hot and noisy and/or slow PC laptop running Windows and a cool, silent, and fast MacBook. Most buyers don't know that choice now exists, and it's the reviewer's job to educate them. Excluding MacBooks from consideration does those buyers a considerable disservice.

Gallup: Americans' confidence in two facets of the news media -- newspapers and television news -- has fallen to all-time low points. Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Both readings are down five percentage points since last year. Gallup has tracked Americans' confidence in newspapers since 1973 and television news since 1993 as part of its annual polling about major U.S. institutions. The latest readings are from a June 1-20 poll that saw declines in confidence ratings for 11 of the 16 institutions measured and no improvements for any. Television news and newspapers rank nearly at the bottom of that list of institutions, with only Congress garnering less confidence from the public than TV news. While these two news institutions have never earned high confidence ratings, they have fallen in the rankings in recent years.

A majority of Americans have expressed confidence in newspapers only once -- in 1979, when 51% did. But there is a wide margin between that and the second-highest readings of 39% in 1973 and 1990. The trend average for newspapers is 30%, well above the latest reading of 16%, which is the first time the measure has fallen below 20%. The percentage of Americans who say they have "very little" or volunteer that they have no confidence is currently the highest on record, at 46%. Confidence in television news has never been higher than its initial 46% reading in 1993 and has averaged 27%, considerably higher than the current 11%. This is the fourth consecutive year that confidence in TV news is below 20%. And for just the second time in the trend, a majority of Americans, 53%, now say they have very little or no confidence at all in TV news. Republicans' (5%) and independents' (12%) confidence in newspapers is the lowest on record for these party groups, while Democrats' (35%) has been lower in the past. Democrats' confidence in newspapers rose to the 42% to 46% range during the Donald Trump administration but fell when President Joe Biden took office.